Thanks for sharing this fantastic piece of Volvo history! Nice interview! Do you have any others?

This website is a fantastic insight into your work at Volvo and I look forward to reading more from you.

I tried to post in the section about the meet at the Arizona proving ground but comments are closed.

It is a huge shame for Volvo not be preserving the three SEMA C30s including the IPD gull wing car. I appreciate it is just a concept so non-standard and cannot be sold, homologated etc, but could it not be preserved by the Volvo musuem?? They also are saving the IPD XC70 AT Orange car even though it was given the same ‘fate’ as the gull wing C30 ie scrapping. Can’t the gullwing go to the museum? Can IPD not preserve it??

What happened to the Evolve car and the Heico AWD C30? Are they also back with their designers? Preserved by them?

If someone volunteered to preserve one of these concepts as per storage and preservation of a vintage car, could Volvo not let someone do that? Obviously, car cannot be driven on the road.

Volvo is extremely good at preserving concept cars, design studies and examples of production cars. The museum has a superb array of pre-production cars preserved (as examples of production models). They only recently unveiled some motorshow demonstrators such as 780, ealry 740, yellow 850 etc all with approx 100 miles or less on their clocks. All previously hidden away in Volvo’s storage department. Plus ‘new’ prototypes from Volvo BV in Holland’s now closed HQ are now in Sweden.

Does preservation of the SEMA cars not come into the museums remit? The XC70 AT has already moved there it seems.

regards

Thanks for the AutoWeek story, I had not read it. We went to the LOV in the Desert Arizona Volvo Club show yesterday at the Volvo Arizona Test Facility. They had some nice entries in the show. It was great to see the facility and they had a demo on-going for folks to test City Safety. The facility is great. I see the Ford element merged some of their stuff when they sold off their test facility. I tested City Safety twice at Sanderson before buying the XC. I tested it when we picked up the car, too. And I just hope it is never needed, but good to know it is active.

The DH thing is funny to see the XC for the show it is used on, that show is so far-fetched and comical. The Mrs Doubtfire 850 is a good image builder. I now need to name the new car, I have always named my cars–the last one was Silver Slipper (S40), the prior one was DW (desert wind, S40) and the DL was Desert LOV. I have had other makes with names, too–Red Pony, Runner (truck), CowGirl (Rodeo), Red Box (Trooper), Dynasty (64 Mustang is now with my nephew), REM (Rotary Engine Mazda), there’s a couple more I just thought it interesting what our passion of cars does!

Cheers from Phoenix,
John

Yes, Desperate Housewives, actually we’ve had couple of our cars there. Some manufactures pay for placement, we don’t. On DH they use our car, much like other production people do, to place create a persona. Mrs. Doubtfire is a perfect example of how, with no need for talking, they immediately created her image by putting her into an 850.

Might be fun to put some sort of list together about how this works.

BTW AutoWeek has a rather good story about designers drawing on napkins, and Peter Horbury is their interviewee. Next week, just by luck, I’ve put up a couple of retro drawings, one by Peter for how a PV544 might look in today’s world.

NICE color XC60. Have you tested City Safety?

kind regards,
dan

This is great history to keep of Volvo in our life. Something else ruminating in my thoughts–Did you know the new XC60 is a featured vehicle of one of the TV characters on ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” show? My mom watches the show and a couple of weeks ago I was watching with her and spotted Terri Hatcher’s character driving a Maple Red XC60. I had not seen any mention of it in other blog circles.

Enjoying our Lime Grass Green XC60 we have had it week–WOW!